Margarita Pizza

Went for the Margarita... Pizza that is! And it came out terrifically. I allowed the crust 5 hours to rise (as opposed to the mere 30 minutes recommended in the instructions), thus giving the dough a more "doughy" taste for Kim. I know that she likes thicker crusts, so I tried this out for kicks. Looking forward, I probably would not do it again, but it was definitely an interesting experiment.

-Mike

Fried Rice with Orange Chicken

Mike and I both enjoy fried rice, or at least Mike claims he likes fried rice.  The recipe in Easy Chinese Recipes calls for carrots, peas, and diced ham.  I don't like carrots or peas and I didn't have ham.  However, I did have turkey bacon, which I figured was similar enough to ham.  I also put spinach in the dish since I figured that I should put some vegetables in it.

The dish did not taste like any fried rice I've ever had, and I don't think it was because of the spinach and turkey bacon.  Even the rice did not taste like regular fried rice.  I honestly think the garlic was too strong in this dish.  This was the Yangzhou Fried Rice recipe.  I might try the "traditional" shrimp fried rice recipe next time.

Mike felt that the freezer was getting too full (there was plenty of room in it if food was moved around), so he made one of the packages of Orange Chicken from Costco to eat with the fried rice.

Root Beer

One of Mike's favorite beverages has to be Root Beer. Mike went with his mom and sister down to Old Town on Cinco de Mayo to celebrate the festivities and enjoy the environment. When down there, they discovered a place that sells just Beef Jerkey and Root Beer! Fast forward about 8 months, and Mike was finally able to drag Kim down to the Root Beer haven. There I got to try 6 different Root Beers. I have ordered them in the above picture from favorite (Left) to least favorite (Right). They were all excellent, but thought that I should rank them regardless.

https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Root+Beer&aq=&sll=32.755128,-117.197334&sspn=0.000908,0.000756&vpsrc=0&t=h&ie=UTF8&hq=Root+Beer&hnear=&z=17&cid=2205698532740886823&iwloc=A

Coconut Columbian Rice

I had some coconut milk left over from the Thai Pumpkin soup that I made for mom and the Basil Curry Chicken.  I didn't know how much I had left, but I figured that it was probably around a half a can or so.  As it turns out, I had about a half a cup, or 1/3 of a can.

I searched the internet for a recipe which included coconut milk, used ingredients that I had on hand, or would probably use in another dish, but was also a dish I would want to eat.  I finally settled on Arroz Con Coco (Colombian Coconut Rice).

Since I only had 1/3 can of coconut milk, I had to divide everything in the recipe by 3.  This is rather difficult since I don't have a "1/3 teaspoon".  I made a best guess for some of the ingredients.

When I was making this dish, Mike commented that it smelled like I was making Rice-A-Roni.  He meant this as a compliment, but I'm not sure the author of this recipe would feel the same way.

I paired the rice with a chicken thigh from a Costco rotisserie chicken.  The rice is good as a side, but does not have enough flavor/salt to be eaten by itself.

Seafood Chow Fun

Since the Beef Chow Fun turned out so well, I wanted to try this Seafood Chow Fun recipe from Easy Chinese Recipes.  It also helped that I had only used a little less than half of my chow fun noodles for the other recipe.

I didn't have all the ingredients in the recipe, so I made some substitutions.  This was a mistake.  I don't really like carrots, and I didn't have the green vegetable (I think it was bok choy).  However, I did have bamboo shoots.  I figured that since I like bamboo shoots, I would just make this simple substitution.  I forget what other seafood items I did not have.  I did put shrimp, calamari and cod in there.

This dish was awful.  It had a very strong seafood taste.  Also, most of the dish was bland, except the shrimp, which was salty.  I'm not sure why, since I didn't add any seasoning to the shrimp itself.

Salt and Pepper Squid

I've always loved eating salt and pepper squid.  I rarely get to eat it, though, since there are not many places that make it correctly.  This dish is not to be confused with the Calamari made at most Italian restaurants.  Yes, both dishes contain squid, but the seasoning on Salt and Pepper squid is much different.

I found this recipe in the book Easy Chinese Recipes.  The recipe was pretty easy, but very salty.  I've made quite a few recipes in this book and have found them to be very salty.  I thought it was just because I used the "wrong" soy sauce, but this dish was very salty as well, and it uses no soy sauce.

I was able to eat this for 4 meals, though I had it with rice.  I couldn't eat it "plain" because it was so salty.  That being said, it was pretty good.  I'd probably make the dish again with about 3/4 the amount of seasoning specified in the recipe.  This dish did not taste good as a leftover.

Beef Chow Fun

I love Chow Fun, and have always had dreams of being able to make it myself.  I never knew which noodles to use.  Apparently it's the flat rice noodles that I use for other dishes!

I used the other half of the flap meat that I bought to make beef and broccoli.  This time I tenderized the meat according to the instructions in Easy Chinese Recipes, even though the step was optional.  The steps to tenderize the meat were the same as the instructions my mom had taught me when I was younger.  I think the beef tasted a lot better in this dish, and will try to factor in the 15 minutes to tenderize the beef first.

I didn't use green onions in this recipe because I didn't have them, and I usually pick those pieces out of my Chow Fun anyway.  I also forgot to buy bean sprouts, so I used spinach instead.  I'm not sure how much spinach I used.  It was probably about two handfuls of cooked spinach.  It adds a "strong" flavor to the Chow Fun, instead of the non-flavored crunch the bean sprouts would have added.

I had put the flat rice noodles in the refrigerator, so I had to warm it up in the microwave to make it soft again.  There are instructions to loosen the flat rice noodle.  I loosened them a little bit, but not much since they were really hot.  As a result, my Chow Fun was rather "clumpy".  I didn't have enough time to break them all apart after I had put them in the pot.

I put the garlic in a big pan to make this dish, and I was fine up until the time when I added in the noodles.  Once I added in the flat rice noodles, I ran out of space and had to switch to the dutch oven. Unfortunately, I had used the dutch oven to make the spinach, so I had to quickly move the spinach (this is the extra spinach that I hadn't put in the Chow Fun) to a small Pyrex bowl before I could put the Chow Fun in the dutch oven.  It all worked out, but now I know that I need to use a bigger pot when making this dish.

This dish also came out rather salty.  I think that the soy sauce I use is saltier than that used by the author, or she likes to eat very salty dishes.  This is the second recipe that I have made from this book that came out way too salty.

Mike tried some of my dish and said "I would eat this".  This is actually a really big compliment since Mike hates Asian food.

Beef and Broccoli

Some of the recipes in Easy Chinese Recipes are poorly laid out, and this is one of them.  On the page on the right is a beautiful picture of the dish, along with an ingredients list.  The following page is the start of the next chapter of the book.  On the previous page is another recipe, however on the right hand side of the previous page are the instructions for how to make this dish.  However, it looks like it could be a continuation of the steps in the previous recipe.

I made a whole broccoli crown and used about half of it in the Stuffed Baked Idaho.  I used the rest of the broccoli on this recipe.  I didn't follow the instructions on how to cook the broccoli since I had already cooked my broccoli.

I also didn't have sesame oil, so I used Canola/vegetable oil.  I don't really like the flavor of sesame anyway, so I figured it wouldn't really hurt.  I also don't like ginger, so I didn't use that either.

The dish was pretty good.  It was rather salty though.  Next time I would use half the amount of soy sauce.

I didn't tenderize the beef since the recipe said that it was an optional step and I was rather hungry.  I used flap meat for this recipe.

Pumpkin Muffins

The other item that we decided to go ahead and give a whirl was the pumpkin muffins. The predominant driver in this, is that we still had some pumpkin left over from the pumpkin pie that I had made a few days ago. Unfortunately, when I received the Executive Order to make the pumpkin muffins, Kim didn't realize that we only had 1/3 of a cup of pumpkin left (the recipe called for 1 cup). So, I had the pleasure of cutting all of the ingredient quantities in 1/3. Not too bad on most things, but kind of sucks cutting 1/4 cup into 3 (1/12 of a cup), especially when you have a white 1/4 measuring cup, and you are trying to measure milk and when the milk is 1/3 the way up the measuring cup. But all prevailed and worked out. We did not use the Vitamix for this recipe, but rather just used my KitchenAid mixer. It turned out producing 7 cupcakes, or what I am coining as a "baker's half-dozen".

Recipe:
https://www.vitamix.com/Find-Recipes/P/U/Pumpkin-Muffins

Lemon Bars

Kim had a potluck to attend tonight and we had a whole pile of lemons, so we decided to give lemon bars a whirl.

Making the crust was pretty straight forward, except whoever wrote the recipe put the butter quantity in lbs, not cups. All the recipes of recent, have all measured the butter in cups. But once, I figured that out, which wasn't too hard because my dough was just powder, it was smooth sailing from there.

The main adventure for this particular adventure was getting the lemon filling done, which was Kim's task. She initially thought that she could use her Vitamix blender to blend the lemons to make the "lemon zest" and "lemon juice", but after using the Vitamix to make the lemon zest, she quickly realized that she was getting a froth instead of a liquid and that she had to get rid of the seeds first (otherwise there were going to be finely grated chunks of seeds in the lemon bars). So, she tried to squeeze the lemons to extract the juice, this went relatively well, but it included a lot of seeds and pulp, neither of which makes for good lemon bars. I had the brilliant idea of using a coffee filter, but yeah, the lemon juice apparently doesn't really pass through it, so when I came back to the coffee filter when the crust was done, it was still all in the filter! So, I just used my hands as a filter to catch pulp/seeds and that worked quickly and efficiently. All else was smooth sailing!

Recipe:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/lemon-bars-recipe/index.html

Chocolate Chip Calzone

One of my all-time favorite desserts is the Chocolate Chip Calzone from Claim Jumper. This decadent treat tastes like a chocolately marshmallow pizza, but it is in fact composed of simply pizza dough, regular chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, and powdered sugar.

Ingredients:

• Pizza Dough
• 3-ounces White Chocolate Chips
• 3-ounces Semi-sweet Regular Chocolate Chips
• Spoonful of Powdered Sugar

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 450 Degrees.
2. Roll out pizza dough into a 12 inch circle.
3. Mix the white and regular chocolate chips evenly over half of the dough.
4. Fold the dough in half to make a crescent moon shape. Pinch the dough shut tightly and press a fork along the edge.
5. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes. Allow to cool for a few minutes and then sprinkle the powdered sugar on top of the calzone.

Pictures of the completed Calzone.

The rolled out ball of dough.

Chocolate chips placed onto half of the Calzone.

The calzone folded over, pinched shut, and a forked edge (for style and fun).